Users typically want their flows to complete as quickly as possible. This makes
Flow Completion Time (FCT) an important - arguably the most important -
performance metric for the user. Yet research on congestion control focuses
entirely on maximizing link throughput, utilization and fairness, which matter
more to the operator than the user. This talk is about a new congestion control
algorithm - Rate Control Protocol (RCP) - designed for fast download times
(i.e. aka user response times, or flow-completion times). Whereas other
modifications/replacements to TCP (e.g. STCP, Fast TCP, XCP) are designed to
work for specialized applications that use long-lived flows (scientific
applications and supercomputer centers), RCP is designed for the typical flows
of typical users in the Internet today.

I will show that with typical Internet
flow sizes, existing (TCP Reno) and newly proposed (XCP) congestion control
algorithms make flows last much longer than necessary - often by one or two
orders of magnitude. In contrast, RCP makes flows finish close to the minimum
possible, leading to a perceptible improvement for web users, distributed
computing, and distributed file-systems. I will also talk about a few of the
many addressed issues under RCP - stability of a RCP network, coping with
sudden network changes such as flash-crowds (the main weakness under RCP),
RCP's router buffer-size requirements, proportional bandwidth-sharing with RCP
and implementation of RCP in routers and end-hosts.